Dr. Nerdlove writes about The Punisher and Frank Castle’s broken masculinity. “Like the incredible Jessica Jones, Marvel’s The Punisher examines and elevates a character and a genre defined by tropes and clichés. Despite being one in a long series of knock-offs of the Lone Vigilante genre – codified in its modern […]
Friend of the Gutter Kimberly Lindbergs writes about Kaneto Shindo’s anti-war horror classic, Onibaba. “The film begins with a vicious murder. While making their way through a dense field of tall grass, two fugitive samurai are impaled on spears by hidden aggressors. Their killers are women who strip […]
“Why is it that I can easily remember the faces and voices of female cartoon villains, but if asked about female cartoon heroes, all I can remember is the clothes?” More on cartoon villainesses from Sarah Gailey at Tor.com. (Thanks, Adele!)
At Hazlitt, Emma Healey writes about a particular scene in the fourth season of Louis CK’s Louie. “By the time Louie was in its fourth season, its protagonist had a lot of audience goodwill to burn, and C.K. seemed to want to do something legitimately complicated with it: […]
Author and comics creator Marjorie Liu is interviewed at The Atlantic. “The comic-book writer discusses working for Marvel, the loneliness of novel-writing, and why her epic-fantasy series is mostly populated by women and characters of color.” (Thanks, Mark!)
Libba Bray writes about the process of turning her novel, Beauty Queens, which re-imagined Lord of the Flies among teen beauty contestants, into a film. “But try, if you will, to imagine me with lasers coming out of my eyes while my internal organs became as the fires […]